Dispatching tasks to multiple Pharo VMs using SystemProcess

Doing a research work in robotic domain using Pharo as a prototype and implementation tool (via phaROS) is a whole new experience. It is quite impressive to see how quick an implementation idea becomes a working prototype/solution in Pharo thanks to its productive development environment. Most of my robotic applications are critical tasks which require real-time performance, some of them are heavily resource-demanding (CPU). Due to the single process nature of Pharo, running these tasks on the same VM results in a performance bottleneck, thus sometime, violate the real-time requirement of the application. Common solution to this problem is to dispatch these tasks to several native system processes to boost the performance. Unfortunately, this feature is not supported in current Pharo. My goal in this case is to have something that allow to:

• maintain the use of Pharo's productive environment, so implementation the applications in another language is not an option
• be able do dispatch tasks to different system processes, (in this case, tasks running on different VMs using the same image), and have a simple inter-VM communication mechanism

And that is when SystemProcess plays its role.